PC-mad BBC where even church bells and Teletubbies are vetted

The BBC has identified new threats to the nation's morals: the Teletubbies and
the composer Sir Edward Elgar.

All episodes of the Teletubbies must be vetted, despite the show being aimed at under-threes and containing few or no normal wordsPhoto: BBC

By Andrew Gilligan

8:00AM GMT 10 Jan 2010

Corporation staff say they have been forced to spend hours vetting preschool children's series and classical music concerts for sex, violence and inappropriate language under "idiotic" compliance rules introduced after the Jonathan Ross scandal.

As Ross, who was suspended for insulting behaviour on air, announced his departure from the BBC last week, staff have told The Sunday Telegraph that his legacy is a "burdensome" bureaucracy which "stifles creativity" while being unlikely to prevent further incidents.

Under the enhanced compliance procedures, which apply to most pre-recorded programmes, every second of material to be broadcast must be watched or listened to check for unacceptable content, and a seven-page form must be filled out.

Among the programmes subjected to the new procedures are parts of the BBC's Armistice Day coverage.

All episodes of the Teletubbies must be vetted, despite the show being aimed at under-threes and containing few or no normal words - although it aroused controversy a decade ago when Jerry Falwell, the American televangelist, accused one of its characters, Tinky Winky, of being homosexual.

Also being vetted are many Radio 3 concerts of works written after 1900. Although "pre-twentieth-century instrumental music is exempt", the compliance rules would cover, for instance, Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance March No 1 – composed in 1901 and later set to words as "Land of Hope and Glory".

One senior manager said there was a "major crisis" about a Radio 3 broadcast of the Benjamin Britten opera, The Turn of the Screw, in which a schoolboy character, Miles, sings Latin slang terms for male genitalia.

There were even moves to vet the ringing of church bells on Radio 4. The peals – broadcast between 5.43 and 5.45am on Sundays, and recorded in a different church each week – count as a programme in their own right and showed up as unauthorised for broadcast on the BBC's compliance database.

"The compliance people wanted to pull the bells off air until they had been checked for inappropriate content," said one BBC staff member. "But the controller [Mark Damazer] put his foot down and common sense prevailed."

"The real problem is Radio 3," said one manager. "There are a few programmes on Radio 3 which are classified as low risk, but most are classified as normal risk, which means they have to be complied. You literally see people with piles and piles of CDs on their desks. They are sitting there with headphones on all day, every day. It is a huge workload."

"Management responses to various crises have created a climate of fear," said one senior member of staff. "Huge numbers of extra processes have been added on. There is a widely-held view that you'll be all right as long as you follow the processes – but the problem is that some of the processes are so silly."

The BBC Trust has ordered a review of compliance procedures, due to report in the next few months. However, the review, by Tim Suter, a former official of the broadcasting watchdog Ofcom, and Tony Stoller, former chief executive of the Radio Authority, is into whether existing compliance procedures are strong enough and appears unlikely to offer any relief to overburdened staff.

Chris Curtis, news editor of the industry magazine, Broadcast, said: "The BBC management are battling to avoid heavy-handed compliance, but a sense of frustration is emerging at lower levels. At the moment the BBC is trying so hard to avoid banana skins that it's possible it could be taking its eye off its central purpose of making great programmes."

The rules were tightened after the public outcry when Ross and Russell Brand, the comedian, broadcast recordings of sexually-explicit and insulting calls they had made to the actor Andrew Sachs. The broadcast, on Brand's Radio 2 show, was pre-recorded and was approved for transmission by BBC management in what the director-general, Mark Thompson, described as a "gross lapse of taste by the performers and the production team". Brand, Lesley Douglas, the controller of Radio 2, and David Barber, the network's head of compliance, all resigned.

BBC producers cautioned that the new approach could actually increase the risk of a new crisis. "Because you have to vet everything, you have less time for the high-risk programmes you ought to be spending your time on," said one. "Compliance forms are coming to be seen as almost more important than programmes. But it's not a be-all and end-all, it's a form."

One of Britain's foremost screenwriters, Tony Marchant, whose credits include the TV adaptation of The Canterbury Tales, recently described how he had been sent on a course by the BBC to understand how to portray "goodies" and "baddies." He described it as "complete nonsense".

Channel 4's head of programming, Julian Bellamy, warned against British television's "culture of compliance" which, he said, "threatens to bland out the medium to no one's benefit". Mr Bellamy particularly attacked the BBC, saying it was becoming "increasingly conservative in its editorial decision making".

The BBC denied that Mr Damazer had got involved over the ringing of the church bells but confirmed the other examples.

A spokesman said: “The BBC’s compliance procedures were strengthened to ensure that all output meets the quality and standards that the audience expects from the Corporation. These procedures are not intended to restrict programme makers in any way and we are confident that properly-considered creative risk-taking is alive and well across the BBC’s services.”